Interview With MARK TORNILLO: “We’re a different band at this point”

Metal giants ACCEPT have been pounding the ear drums of metalheads around Europe on “The Rise Of Chaos” tour since early January. Metal Shock Finland’s Alison Booth had a chat with vocalist Mark Tornillo when ACCEPT were in Paris, for her Blackdiamond’s Metal Mayhem radio show, (which can be heard here) just before the band’s explosive and packed out show in London. Many topics were covered including the fans, Mark‘s love of vinyl and his thoughts on joining such an iconic metal band – you can read a few excerpts below and listen to the full interview on the audio player:

On playing the UK Mark stated:

“I wish we were dong more shows. At the end of the day, it’s not really up to us – it’s up to the promoters and powers that be and we’ll have to see what happens. But at least we’ve got one.”

When asked if there could be a more widespread UK tour, Mark answered:

“I hope so, I wouldn’t doubt it. I mean things really seem to be progressing, so we’re gonna be doing a lot of festivals this summer too. Hopefully we’ll be there for one of those, well you never know.”

Talking about ACCEPT fans:

“Makes me feel great, it makes me feel great that they accepted me into the Accept family, no pun intended! It’s been wow man, going on ten years for me now which is just insane. We just had an incredible run through Spain, three shows in Spain and they were just ridiculous – off the hook, you can’t even imagine! The fans are what make it happen definitely.”

Mark TornilloLondon 2018Photo By John Lambton

One of the newest songs ‘Analog Man’, from “The Rise Of Chaos” is about Mark, so of course I asked him about it:

“I’m just one of those people who has issues with computers and all of that nonsense. I’m not totally crippled but just not computer savvy, put it that way. I get what I have to get done and that’s about it. But in the end it just annoys me, you know when things don’t work and things I can’t figure out. And I just get annoyed and I also look at them and I go look, see me – analog, analog man! You can have your digital work, analog man!’ And they just wrote the damn song!”

Moving on to vinyl, Mark expressed:

“I had a lot of vinyl at one time. I still have some of it, but over the years from moving, you know, living with different people and stuff, I guess a lot of it just went different places, but I still have a lot of my favourite records. AC/DC – I have the entire box set, I think the latest one in that was The Razors Edge maybe. I got them all on vinyl, I’m an AC/DC nut.”

Discussing when he joined ACCEPT, Mark revealed:

“It was frightening. When we first announced what was going to happen, there was really not many people on board with it. Online there was a lot of naysayers, a lot of badmouthing, it was very disheartening. We all sat down and said, ‘look, we have to make an amazing record or else we’re gonna die here’ and that’s what we did. We spent a lot of time writing Blood Of The Nations and a lot of time recording it and I think in retrospect, it paid off. If that album wasn’t what it was, we wouldn’t be here.”

On people who still don’t ‘accept’ today’s ACCEPT:

“Everybody is entitled to their opinion – I’m a purist too with certain things, I get it. But I think we’ve moved on, we’re a different band at this point. We still pay tribute to the old Accept by playing the old songs, I mean we have the two people that wrote most of the songs, we have to. That’s always gonna be part of Accept’s history, we can’t change it. All we can change is the future.

I wish them all well, I wish Udo well and his band you know. No hard feelings on my part, that’s for sure.”

Discussing the future for ACCEPT, Mark said:

“That’s a good question – it’s still up in the air what’s gonna happen the rest of the year after the festivals. We may continue touring all year, I really don’t know. After that, it remains to be seen, maybe do another record, I don’t know. We’re too old to take five years off (laughs). At some point we’re gonna have to call it quits or just go right back to the studio. It is what it is, or just continue touring.

We do as much as we can, but you can’t oversaturate either. You just have to pray for new markets too and thank God for South America – that’s become a great market for us, actually we’re gonna go back in May. Australia seems to be picking up for us, we just have to be consistent. It’s just like the old days, you have to tour consistently and hit those places and keep pounding ’em, that’s how you pick up fans.”